Video Transcript for Timbren Silent Ride Suspension Review

Today we're going to be taking a look at the Timbren line of silent ride suspension systems. Now, these systems have been designed to work for trailers with capacities anywhere from 2000 pounds all the way up to 14,000.Now, the silent ride system from Timbren is really one of the best upgrades you can make to a trailer suspension. This is going to give you excellent handling out of your trailer. You're not going to have so much of the side-to-side. You're also going to feel it less as you haul it.As our suspension system works here up and down, whether you're got your trailer loaded to capacity or empty, you will hear any feel a noticeable difference in the ride quality on your trailer. Now, I really appreciate that, because we haul a lot of trailers around here, and it's just aggravating, always hearing that noise, and always hearing that rattle behind you.

This has almost completely eliminated it on this trailer.This is also going to be very important when it comes to car haulers. You've got cars in here, sometimes race cars, expensive cars. You don't want them being beat up, your tools that are in there. You don't want them shaking around a whole lot. This is also going to work out really well for our camper trailers.

We've got dishes, we've got stuff in there that's important. We've got our tools stored in there. We just don't want them getting beat up.Installing a suspension system like this is really going to smooth all of that out for you.Now, the setup we have here today is the single axle configuration. You can see, we've got or 2x2 cross tube here, our axle here. This is also going to be available in a tandem axle configuration.

This body here becomes a little bit longer, we're going to have one of these off the back, we're going to have one of them off the front. Basically, you're going to have the same cross tube, but it's going to be 2x4, and it sits between them. Right up flush against here and the other side. All in all, it's going to give us a really good solution.Basically, the way this system works, we're going to mount the upper bracket to our trailer. We've got our lower arm here, that's free floating.

We've got an Aeon rubber spring here, and also here. This one is constantly trying to expand out slightly, and it's applying upward pressure on our arm. This one's applying downward pressure on our arm. As we hit a bump, of course, this is going to go up, as this goes up, this is going to expand. This one wants to pull it back, wants it get it back to its normal configuration. This one pushing out wants to get it to its normal configuration.If we think about a regular leaf spring style suspension, it's just sitting there in the middle. It's just going to wiggle when we hit bumps and stuff like that. Where, this is fighting to remain nice and steady and calm, over all those different bumps.Now, let's take a look at our conventional leaf spring suspension, versus our Timbren suspension. As you can see, there's a lot less movement, the trailer doesn't bounce up nearly as much, so it's generating a lot less noise. Overall, it's going to offer a much smoother and more controlled ride.Now, let's take a look at just the silent ride system, as we go through our test course. You can see as we're hitting the different bumps, you're not seeing as much movement as what we're used to with a conventional suspension system. It recovers very quickly. Now as we're just doing some maneuvering around our parking lot, you can see there's no trailer roll side to side. With them working independently, it helps kept everything level.These are also going to offer a variable spring rate. If we load our trailer with a light load, these are going to be compressed slightly, and that's all the effort they're going to have to put out, so it's not going to stiffen up our ride tremendously. As our load gets heavier and heavier, these compress more and more, they're going to get stiffer and stiffer, so they're almost going to adjust for the load that you put on, to maximize your ride quality.Now, the brackets we have here, of course, these are going to be heavy duty steel construction. They've got the black finish on it, help resist any kind of corrosion or issues like that for a long time to come.Now, on your tandem setup, there's a huge advantage in how the Timbren system equalizes the weight equally across your axles. With this single setup, we're going to have our upper bracket, we're going to have our base arm. With the tandem setup, we're still going to have our upper bracket, we're still going to have our base arm, but there's a walking leg that goes in between those. It's going to have a single pivot point right here in the middle, so as the tire gets pushed up in the back, it forces that front tire down. As the tire in the front gets pushed up, it forces that rear tire town. It maintains equal load across both axles at all times. That's something we don't see in leaf spring suspensions, even with equalizers installed. They just don't transfer that properly.Now, one thing to keep in mind when installing this system is that we need to reuse your existing axle. Where it meets the silent ride here, they provide us with this axle seat, so essentially, you're going to remove your old axle, you're going to grind those spring seats off of it to get it nice and flat. Get everything pre-assembled, place it up here, and you'll lay that weld across the back.Now, once we've decided where we're going to be positioning the silent ride, I've marked my holes in center punch. You can see here. You can leave the silent ride clamped into position, as if when you we're setting it up, and use those holes as the guide, if you want to do it that way, that's going to be completely up to you. What we need to wind up with a 5/8th inch diameter hole, we're going to use a step bit. We're going to 3/16ths, go up to a 3/8th, just slowly work up to that 5/8th. Generally, that's the easiest way to drill through this steel.We're going to get both our holes drilled out on this side, and do the same thing on the other side. Now that we got our holes drilled, we're going to take our hardware, get it put in place, we're using 5/8th diameter bolts, you want to use at least grade five, these happen to be grade eight. On to backside, we're going to put a flat washer on. Put a lock washer on. Also, our nut. Now we can snug out hardware down, ours takes a 15/16th, as long as yours is standard 5/8th, it should be the same. All right, now we'll torque those down to the specifications, which are listed in the instructions.Now, we've got our axle up in position. We've got our perches, our spring perches here on the bottom. Now, we had our welder take care of this, we had it all mocked up. We had him pre-weld this, although in your application, you're just going to have to out a bead across this side, and right up here. In the instructions, they tell you just to weld this up after you've got everything bolted up, so you might want to do it that way. It's going to be up to you.We just want to make sure we get our axle centered. You measure from your brake flange here, out to here, or to the center of your trailer, whatever you want to do. You want to make sure that's equal on both sides. Now, we've brought our U bolts down and around. You can see here, each one of those gets a washer, and a nut, and we're going to use a crisscross pattern, get those snugged down, and then we're going to torque them per the instructions.Now, here we've installed our crossmember. This needs to be a 2x2 inch squared piece of tubing. You can see it's 3/16th of an inch thickness. We want it 2x2, 3/16th inch wall. We've got our holes, we got one here, one here that we need to drill. Now, those are going to go in, all the way through, and then they need to come out that upper bracket. I'm going to mark my bottom here. Just using a center punch.Now, for our upper hole location here, it's going to be really tough to get anything in there to mark it. I'm just going to use a right angle pick. I'm going to go all the way around that elongated hole. Then we can just mark the center of that.All right, now we're ready to drill them out. These need to go to a half inch in diameter. We're going to use this step bit process, just like we did on our trailer. Gradually enlarging it.Then once we have the four drilled out here on this side, we're going to flip it over, and use our marks to drill our holes on this side.Now we've got our crossmember put back in place, we're just lining up those holes. We want to take our bolt. We want to pass it up through. On the top, we're going to be using a nylon locknut. Now, depending on your application, this might be a pretty tight fit in here. You could also use a flat washer, a lock washer and a nut, if you have space. It seems like for us, this nylon locknut's really the best solution. We're going to put one in each hole, so two on this side. We've already got the two on the other side. Now we'll get them tightened down.Most of your half inch bolts, you're going to need a 19mm or 3/4, unless you're using something odd sized. Now, we'll want to get these torqued down. Now, once we've got all that torqued down to specifications, we've gone through everything, make sure everything's nice and secure, it's time to just basically rebuild our axles.That's going to complete our look at the Timbren line of silent ride suspension systems.